Month: May 2010

The most revealing item from his interview on his own network was how ‘the most trusted name in news‘ cable network has been used to promote Turner’s own beliefs about global warming:

WHITFIELD: So how do you convince people, what would you say to those who say, you know what, the way I’m living right now is just fine. I’m happy with the light bulbs I choose. Convince me this is the way I would want to go.

TURNER: Anybody that watches CNN would know pretty well. They would already be convinced, because we’ve run thousands of stories about it, everything from light bulbs to saving fuel and automobiles to recycling. It’s everywhere.

NASA has known that one of the underlying assumptions used in global warming models is junk. What might be worse is that they tried to fudge numbers to NOT let the truth be revealed. Observations of the moon’s absorption and radiation of heat disproved assumptions behind the ‘black-body’ approximations:

“During lunar day, the lunar regolith absorbs the radiation from the sun and transports it inward and is stored in a layer approximately 50cm thick….in contrast with a precipitous drop in temperature if it was a simple black body, the regolith then proceeds to transport the stored heat back onto the surface, thus warming it up significantly over the black body approximation…”

Thus, the ‘blackbody approximations’ were proven to be as useful as a chocolate space helmet; the guesswork of using the Stefan-Boltzmann equations underpinning the man-made global warming theory was long ago debunked. If NASA had made known that Stefan-Boltzmann’s numbers were an irrelevant red-herring then the taxpayers of the world would have been spared the $50 billion wasted on global warming research; because it would have removed the only credible scientific basis to support the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide changed Earth’s climate.

The global warming hoax truly is the largest scam on Earth, handily exposed by the moon.

We expect some of the most significant impacts of climate change to occur when natural variability is exacerbated by long-term global warming, so that even small changes in global temperatures can produce damaging local and regional effects. Year on year the evidence is growing that damaging climate and weather events – potentially intensified by global warming – are already happening and beginning to affect society and ecosystems. This includes:

In the UK, heavier daily rainfall leading to local flooding such as in the summer of 2007;

Increased risk of summer heat waves such as the summers of 2003 across the UK and Europe;

Around the world, increasing incidence of extreme weather events with unprecedented levels of damage to society and infrastructure. This year’s unusually destructive typhoon season in South East Asia, while not easy to attribute directly to climate change, illustrates the vulnerabilities to such events;

Sea level rises leading to dangerous exposure of populations in, for example, Bangladesh, the Maldives and other island states;

Persistent droughts, leading to pressures on water and food resources, and the increasing incidence of forest fires in regions where future projections indicate long term reductions in rainfall, such as South West Australia and the Mediterranean.

Yesterday’s announcement by the Royal Society represents a climb-down from their November statement, a fact celebrated by Romm’s nemesis Marc Morano. If the Royal Society’s forthcoming report is a proper scientific look at global warming, no wonder warmist’s are running scared.

Al Gore channels Monty Python, there’s a long list of hyphen-gate scandals for you to cut out and keep, Big Green is out of step with ordinary people and there is a planet doomed by global warming, but it’s not Earth.

All that and a hottie from down under in your weekly round-up.

Part One: Al Gore & Friends

The well-meaning but terminally misguided Internet hippies at change.org ask a simple question, ‘why does everyone hate Al Gore?‘ The answer, of course, is an inconvenient truth. Not the movie, the truth about Al Gore.

Gore’s downfall over the past few years has been epic, like something out of a Shakespearean tragedy. How did it happen?

The answer, I fear, has to do with a larger crisis of faith in climate change. Skeptics (both duplicitous and sincere), the GOP, Big Coal and Big Oil, and the IPCC and Climategate scandals have successfully commandeered the debate, so much so that a recent poll revealed belief in global warming has hit a new low. Gore is an easy scapegoat for people attempting to convince the public that global warming is a massive fraud. And those who once believed in climate change but are now doubtful consider Gore a false prophet.

If Al did ever decide to take any action, other than jetting around the world, collecting awards and mansions, he has a grassroots army of brainwashed moppets just waiting for the word. It was to link to that without resorting to a ‘greenshirts’ slur. Oh, wait. Doh!

…estimates show that the Gulf oil clean-up will cost in excess of $10 billion, and result in economic damage nearly twice that. Those estimates come while the oil is still flowing, with BP still fumbling for a plug. That’s at least $30 billion, all totaled…

*(mini-update: James in the comments suggests I might be wrong about the math, and much as it pains me, he might be right. It’s a matter of interpretation. Which is my excuse and I’ll stick to it.)

Whitehead suggests that if the spill bankrupts BP, the US taxpayer will shoulder the burden. While the clean up costs would be a significant blow for BP, it reported first quarter earnings of $5.6 billion. Of course, if US taxpayers really want to meet the cost themselves, a boycott of BP sounds like an excellent idea.

Canadian hippie cult leader David Suzuki has landed a new radio show on Can-Jazeera the CBC, because there is no left-wing bias at the national broadcaster. No comment from the CBC about Suzuki’s appearance at a decidedly left-leaning anti-oil rally. To balance the airwaves, fellow Canadian and climate skeptic Dr. Tim Ball doesn’t have a new radio show on the CBC. Oh wait, nevermind.

What really struck me about the occasion, though, was the unspeakable direness of the opposition. I don’t mean the nice girl from Trinity College: as an officer of the Union, she had to take whatever side of the debate she was given to argue. I mean the three others, who embodied pretty much everything wrong with the green movement: its crypto communism; its woeful ignorance; and its sphincter-popping rage.

Dave Matthews, a musician who looks like the quiet neighbor people never suspect as pre-postal, wants you to ride a bike. Because he’s on tour, or something.

you ordinary people are leetle... like this

The UN, sensing the pending extinction of the global warming hoax has found a new global threat that requires all of the western world’s money to solve, biodiversity. No, really, different problem, same solution. It’s brilliant.

A bus company thinks that CO2 is poisonous. Hopefully they’re not sitting in a closed garage with the buses running under the assumption that CO is just dandy.

Perennial ecotard Lewis Pugh swam around a lake on Mount Everest to raise awareness about global warming. Does Pugh think there is anyone left on the planet that has not heard of global warming? Excepting undiscovered midget people in the deep Brazilian rainforests, natch.

Jeremy Irons isn’t just an actor, he’s a thespian. Unless he’s in Die Hard 3 when he’s a hack with a bad accent. Irons (the thesp, not the hack) declares that we must all live more sustainably. Which of his seven homes he was in at the time was unclear.

Plane Stupid, the best named activist group evah, chained themselves to an airliner. If they were really stupid, it would have been a British Airways jet and no-one would have noticed, but alas not.

Size matters, and so does scale. This is your must read of the week, because it’s a perfect example of media scaremongering and cherry picking:

But what does that volume, a third of Lake Erie, really mean? We could also say that it’s 80 million Olympic swimming pools, or 400 times the volume of Sydney Harbor, or about the same volume as the known world oil reserves. Or we could say the ice loss is 550 times the weight of all humans on the Earth, or the weight of 31,000 Great Pyramids … but we’re getting no closer to understanding what that ice loss means.

To understand what it means, there is only one thing to which we should compare the ice loss, and that is the ice volume of the Greenland Ice Cap itself. So how many cubic kilometres of ice are sitting up there on Greenland?

The rabid leftards at Daily Kos decided that the Gulf spill is the perfect crisis to exploit. In fact, it’s so good it’s the ecotard 9/11:

Unless we use this moment, use the deathsof species and the suffering of people who depend on them, in the most cynical, calculated way, as bad as a Republican after 9/11, to make real, lasting change in how we address the costs of our way of life. You cannot save the Gulf. But you can make its death mean something.

Spain, no longer the US government’s poster child for the bright green sustainable future now that reality has bitten:

La Gaceta runs with a full-page article fessing up to the truth about Spain’s “green jobs” boondoggle, which happens to be the one naively cited by President Obama no less than eight times as his model for the United States. It is now out there as a bust, a costly disaster that has come undone in Spain to the point that even the Socialists admit it, with the media now in full pursuit.

Where the IPCC has departed from science is that they have become advocates for one particular set of hypotheses, and have become militant fighters against all others… Unfortunately, each modeling group (or the head of each group) already has an idea stuck in their head regarding how much warming looks “about right”. I doubt that anyone could be trusted to perform an unbiased investigation into model formulations which produce very little warming in response to increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.

A planet with some real global warming worries is WASP-12b. It might not be romantically named, but it IS doomed by rising temperatures. Unfortunately WASP-12b-eings won’t be able to save their planet by building giant fans, because it’s their SUN, stupid.

offset that

If you ever wondered why scientists blame global warming for everything, wonder no more. It’s for fortune and glory, but mostly the fortune.

…the Achilles heel of environmentalism–its profound disconnect from public preferences and aspirations. By embracing such a radical social engineering agenda, the greens may end up undermining their own long-term effectiveness.

The first sign of this pushback, notes analyst Walter Russell Mead, can be seen in growing skepticism about climate change policies both here and in Europe. At a time of severe economic challenges, greens and their political allies need to consider how specific environmental costs threaten an already beleaguered middle and working class.

Part Four: AGW in the News

Canada and the US think that making transportation more expensive is just a dandy way to cope with a recession, or something.

You know who’s partly to blame for the Gulf oil disaster and no progress on global warming laws? Big Green lobbyists who take money from big oil, that’s who:

Jay Hair – the president of the National Wildlife Federation from 1981 to 1995 – was dissatisfied. He identified a huge new source of revenue: the worst polluters. Hair found that the big oil and gas companies were happy to give money to conservation groups. Yes, they were destroying many of the world’s pristine places. Yes, by the late 1980s, it had become clear that they were dramatically destabilising the climate – the very basis of life itself. But for Hair, that didn’t make them the enemy; he said they sincerely wanted to right their wrongs and pay to preserve theenvironment. He began to suck millions from them, and his organisation and others gave them awards for “environmental stewardship”. Companies such as Shell and BP were delighted.

A genius green designer has made a sustainable house of straw able to withstand hurricanes. Not that Bath has any hurricanes. How the house would cope with a lit match is not mentioned.

Al Gore will continue to channel from his Montecito hilltop the latest green consensus of the international academic community. But fairly or not, neither he nor it will be listened to all that much: He has made one too many millions off his hysteria, and professors have fudged one too many publicly funded studies. The result is that almost at once both have lost the people’s trust. A volcano, not hot weather, shut down European air travel. The Sierra Nevada is still buried under snow in late May. At least this year, a wet, cold state of California is not going to blow away, as Energy Secretary Chu warned not long ago.

Global warming is good business for retired world leaders, just ask Bambi, but oil spills are a real pain for current world leaders, just ask Barry.

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Part Five: Global Hottie

Lost is done. I became a closet Lostie and caught up on five seasons on DVD just in time to enjoy the series end. In tribute to some mighty fine television, your hottie for the week is Aussie Emilie de Ravin, or Claire if you prefer. She might have been knocked-up for 30% of the show and a mop-haired crazed mountain girl for another 30%, but hot is hot.

Pity the Alaotra grebe, for it is dead. Or, if you’re a biologist, extinct, which is really dead.

The ex-Madagascan bird hasn’t been seen for 25 years, which is almost certainly caused by it no longer existing.

Any species shuffling off this mortal coil is sad, but the hapless grebe is being hailed as a canary in the coal mine for a pending mass extinction event:

A rare Madagascan wetland bird has been declared extinct in what scientists believe may herald the beginning of a global catastrophe only recorded five times in Earth’s history. The dying out of the Alaotra grebe, found only in Madagascar and not seen for 25 years, has led biologists to claim we are on the verge of the ‘sixth great extinction’.

The previous five cataclysmic events during Earth’s prehistory, such as the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago possibly caused by a meteorite hitting Earth, were naturally caused. This is the first time humans have been implicated in causing mass global extinction.

See what you and your SUV did now? Mass extinction. It’s only happened five times before in the planet’s history without man, so clearly this is all your fault. The Daily Mail has this handy graphic to explain how factories emitting a trace gas that feeds plants has the same cataclysmic power as an asteroid from space, or something:

Once every 60 to 140 million years or so, the planet cleans house and resets the species count. The last mass extinction was 65 million years ago, so we’re in the geologic time frame window for another reboot. If there is another extinction event coming, rest assured that the only reason to blame mankind is because someone, somewhere needs a study funded.

Danish environment minister Troels Lund Poulsen decided, on behalf of the government, on 30th September 2009, that the clearing of 15 km2 of forest in the north west of Denmark will take place. A test centre for the development of offshore windmills is planned to take up 30 km2 of land in the Thy region, near Østerild.

It’s bad enough that a bird shredder factory will need so many trees to die, but somewhere, someone is missing the point of alternative enery, to reduce CO2 emissions:

This deforestation will create an increase of 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emission, the equivalent of the CO2 emission of 100,000 people per year.

The new wind farm will start with a huge carbon deficit that will take decades to recover, even if the farm is spectacularly successful.

Wakefield could not have caused the huge scare single-handed. He needed the help of compliant sections of the media which like to alarm their readers. And I think that those journalists who did so much to spread the scare should ask themselves serious questions about the extent to which they properly examined the facts or were simply swept along by the general hysteria and by their desire to relate a sensational story.

Eventually the medical journal Lancet retracted the original paper, but that won’t bring dead kids back or soothe the souls of parents that failed to vaccinate their children.

Andrew Wakefield lost his job, his career and his credibility as punishment for his central role in the MMR scare. In the global warming arena, Michael Mann is being investigated for fraud for his debunked hockey stick graph, a central element in the junk science of the global warming hoax.

Other warmist scientists are bleating about being held accountable for their words. As Dr Wakefield has discovered, people don’t like being taken for fools and the consequences of unethical, dishonest science are far more real than his manufactured conclusions ever were.

In general, tutored by TV’s Professor Beck, we’re hearing that true conservatives should regard the New Deal etc. as unconstitutional too. It’s become fashionable to harp on the Progressive narrative from Woodrow Wilson to Lyndon Johnson as the key to what has derailed our country. The implication is that our Court abdicated its responsibility by not declaring the regulatory administrative state unconstitutional. Neither Porcher Nor Libertarian at Postmodern Conservative

Scotland, the sparsely populated area to the north of England mostly famous for Sean Connery, is pursuing a huge offshore wind project to power its haggis factories with.

The massive wind power project will cost £180 billion, or roughly the same as 60 new nuclear plants (approx cost £2.8 billion each). At least the Scots have found a better use for the breeze than blowing up their kilts and giving unwary tourists a shock, but still, this seems expensive. Remember that some UK offshore wind farms are already a sunk cost.

The UN has found something it thinks is more important than global warming, biodiversity.

Don’t worry, the UN hasn’t given up on running the world, the biodiversity initiative chases the same dream nightmare:

The report will advocate massive changes to the way the global economy is run so that it factors in the value of the natural world. In future, it says, communities should be paid for conserving nature rather than using it; companies given stricter limits on what they can take from the environment and fined or taxed more to limit over-exploitation; subsidies worth more than US$1tn (£696.5bn) a year for industries like agriculture, fisheries, energy and transport reformed; and businesses and national governments asked to publish accounts for their use of natural and human capital alongside their financial results.

And the potential economic benefits are huge. Setting up and running a comprehensive network of protected areas would cost $45bn a year globally, according to one estimate, but the benefits of preserving the species richness within these zones would be worth $4-5tn a year.

Meet the new scam, same as the old scam.

While the UN seeks the suckers that will provide $45 billion per year, the UK found that saving biodiversity isn’t an easy thing to do.